The interesting thing I learned about this "mess" is that apparently Chinese government never wanted to go down this path. They had drank the Kool-aid so to speak and were happy in the unipolar world order having to rely on importing technologies. The idiots in Washington on the other hand, specifically starting from Trump admin., thought bans work and like always they were wrong.
Now China is running its own massive chip industries that is growing much faster than its competitors and they are also entering the "high tech chips" territories and setting new records.

It's worth repeating what I said 6-7 months ago:

Are you trying to create the joke of the month?
Erdogan should first stop bowing to the Zionists then stop helping genocide of Palestinians by sending the Zionists resources such as fuel for their tanks and cement for occupiers' illegal settlements.

The irreversible transactions was a solution to the existing problem with payment systems that have reversible transactions. Just check out how many merchants are being scammed when they are paid through something like PayPal and you'll realize what Bitcoin solved.

It is not a problem either because unlike reversible transactions, there are rather easy solutions for what you explained. One could be payments to reputable "receivers". For example back when Valve was accepting Bitcoin, you wouldn't see anybody complaining about them running away since it is a reputable gaming platform. The other solution is using escrows or even a 2of2 multi sig between yourself and the merchant (without a third party escrow).

It's crazy how much money people pay for weird stuff like this that in reality have no value
It was cool and all what he did and even I wore this iconic picture as an avatar for a while but I wouldn't pay more than $10 for something like this...

P.S. I love how they're holding it up wearing gloves in the picture as if it is some ancient work of art that needs to be preserved LOL

You are heavily limiting the definition of "world of crypto" by limiting it to only include "traders".

This is was expected too. When the government watches trillions of dollars in a certain market changing hands and loads of profits being made, it was always obvious for them to want their "cut"! So in a way, this is not even a big change that we didn't know was coming.
The rest is completely the same though. For example Bitcoin is just as decentralized as it should be and you can use it like always.

The "digest" that is used in signing and subsequently for verifying is not the txid, it is double SHA256 hash of a special serialization of the transaction that depends on the type of the output that was being spent.
For example since in this case the output that is being spent is a P2WPKH the steps to compute the digest (ie. sighah) are explained here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0143.mediawiki

What do you mean by "value"? Is it market capitalization of bitcoin? That is $1.3 trillion which puts Bitcoin on the 9th biggest market according to this list: https://8marketcap.com/ which is above a lot of big companies like Meta and big banksters like JPMorgan Chase.

In other words "value-wise" Bitcoin can handle a lot, not to mention that it is still appreciating and has a lot of potential for more rises which would increases its "value"!
The real question is "does it need to do any of what you said?" and the answer to that is no.

There are always new investors coming in but I don't think there were a significant increase in the number of new investors before halving. The rise we experienced is pretty much the existing traders that only looked at the historical charts and realized each time before each having there is a rise so they started buying more bitcoin than before hence creating the rise.

Not in "crypto industry", halving is a Bitcoin related event and some altcoins that copied Bitcoin also follow the same thing but may have different intervals.
It is also not "believed" to happen every 4 years, it is part of the consensus rules and must happen every 210000 blocks that happen to take about 4 years.

This is the 4th halving we've had and so far the hashrate has only grown, meaning the number of miners has grown. The reward has gone down from: 50 > 25 > 12.5 > 6.25 > 3.125
Some miners may shut down and go away if the operation is not profitable enough for them. But the total hashrate is important to us not these small changes.

When a block is found, there is a reward that can not be bigger than the predefined amount. The miner that found that block will receive all of it. However, since nowadays mining is like a cooperation through "pools" there are multiple miners that find a block so they split that reward amongst themselves based on their amount of contribution.

The reward is in Bitcoin while their cost of mining (electric bill, employees' salaries, taxes, etc.) is in fiat so how much 1 bitcoin is worth affects them.

Mempool is not a singular place to have a "complication" and have a global effect; each node has its own mempool and not to mention to find a block you don't necessarily need mempool, the block can be empty.

They don't have to, they can "solo mine" but they'll have to run their own full node and monitor a lot of things. So it is easier to join a pool specially if their hashrate is too low to find a block often enough.

It depends on the trade. A lot of strategies can be automated, off the top of my head I can mention stop loss orders that need to be executed automatically and from trading strategies I can think of Arbitrage Trading which has to be fully automated to work efficiently and fast. In fact arbitrage is not something you can do manually and make profit.

You have 20 words to place in 18 positions (the first 6 are already filled and 24-6=18) so it is 20*19*18*...*4*3

Bitcoin, with all its awesomeness!, has some shortcomings and flaws too. One of those is its vulnerability to spam attacks that can create congestion and cause fee spikes. That "shortcoming" exists because there is a finite amount of space available in each block but there can be virtually infinite number of transactions competing for that space.

A while ago, someone found another exploit in the protocol which allowed them to inject an arbitrary message into each block with an arbitrary size. Then they created a scam known as Ordinals where they sold those messages to newbies who didn't understand what "token" really means. That scam market picked up a lot of gamblers who then participated in creating a lot of such messages exploiting the protocol and effectively spamming the network.

This recent fee spike is the result of that ongoing spam attack.

It is not an idea anybody had, it is just FUD. Every time there is a Halving, there are people who spread this FUD about "miners going away and bitcoin dying" but it never happens. The nature of mining is in a way that it keeps going and when it is accompanied by price rising, the miners' profit grows too but in the long run.
Don't forget that price wasn't always $65k-$70k. It's not so long ago when it was less than half this ($30k-$35k) and miners were making a lot of profit then. And with 3.125BTC reward at $65k we are at the same place as back then!

This is one of the many consequences of the Energy and Economic Crisis I have been talking about over the past 3 years. That's just the government trying to cut costs and the biggest pressure is on the lowest income groups such as the farmers. Hence the ongoing protests over the past couple of years!

It is too soon to see a major food shortage in UK because for now they've been "loosening" the laws an importing lower quality food products that are cheaper and the consequences of which will be seen in the diminishing health of the population over the coming years...

It really isn't though. It's just a block like the other hundreds of thousands of bitcoin blocks

It is worth clarifying here that the fees weren't this outrageously high just because people were trying to get into block #840000. The main reason for it is an ongoing spam attack that started a couple of weeks ago and has been artificially inflating the fees.

Here is the visualization of mempool from the past 2 weeks. The mouse is on top of the approximate place where block #840000 was mined. You can see how the spam started a long time ago and has only grown ever since. There is only a small spike at #840000 as the underlying spam attack continues

That is why Ordinals can be categorized as a scam because it is not an NFT. To be a "token", first Bitcoin has to be a token creation platform (which it isn't) and it has to contain actual script/smart contract that is executed inside and enforced by the Bitcoin protocol (which it isn't).

Ordinals is just arbitrary data that is being injected into the bitcoin blockchain by exploiting a flaw in the SegWit rules consensus rules.

Satoshi didn't do that. Someone else created this whole fakery!

Satoshi Nakamoto has already answered that (just replace DNS with the Ordinals crap and it's pretty much the same thing):

It kinda is! Considering how Ordinals work (a completely separate and centralized place where people put a value on random UTXOs) you can decide to place a value on any UTXO the same way! and call it a "unique unit".

Can we call someone who is mainly interested in the "price" and bull runs a "bitcoin enthusiast"? That sounds more like fiat enthusiast, but I suppose it is OK as long as price is not the only thing that person is interested in

I'm personally always interested in any adoption-related news. Like another country adopting bitcoin as legal tender or even any general "good" regulations that helps the adoption of it grow.
Other thing I always hope to see is other countries starting to get into mining bitcoin more. We are in need of as much decentralization as we can get. Concentration of mining hashrate in certain countries is always dangerous and a threat for Bitcoin's decentralization specially countries that are known for abusing powers like China and USA.

Whoever wrote that article has no understanding of the economy
Specially since they are comparing USD with Japanese Yen and interest rates.

Let me put it simply.
When Japan prints money (lets say a million dollar equivalent) that money is only going to be used domestically inside Japan and it only enters Japanese economy. Simultaneously when the Japanese government wants to sell any bonds they pretty much sell it domestically to Japanese so that also stays domestically.
On the other hand when US prints money (a million dollar) that money is used globally and enters global economy. When they increase interest rates and sell bonds they also sell it globally.

So for example the $1 million US printed is going to be used by Saudi Arabia to sell its oil to Japan and the bond US printed and dumped on the world is also going to be bought by Japan. So now Japan is facing 2 inflations: First is the one caused by the $1 million they printed themselves and Second is the $1 million US printed and they used. Meanwhile they are also using the little money they have left to buy US bonds to help US economy stay up instead of using that domestically to improve their own economy

This is not called "US economy booming", it is called a Ponzi scheme at its peak.

Otherwise a healthy and booming economy does not have:
1. A high inflation
2. A high interest rates
3. A government that prints $1 trillion every 100 days
4. A massive trade deficit
5. A massive national debt ($35 trillion) and growing

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So things are pretty much the same as 6 years ago when you started this topic.
The more the world dedollarises, the more they decouple from the Ponzi scheme known as US economy so the more their own respective currencies strengthen and the more US dollar weakens.

If they do the opposite and do less dedollarisation, use more US dollar and increase their dependence on the Ponzi scheme, the more their own respective currencies dumps and the more their economies weaken while US dollar strengthens.
This goes on until we see another catastrophe like 2008 when the Ponzi scheme falls apart and it significantly and negatively affects global economy. More effects on those who didn't dedollarise...

Americans aren't, the American regime and the small number of oligarchs behind the scene are.

Just take a look at the stats from the past ~50 years.
The middle class is pretty much screwed and has mostly fallen down to lower class now while lower class has entered absolute poverty.
With poverty and homelessness on the rise every year setting a new record.
The infrastructure that is getting old and in a lot of sectors counted as decrepit without any budget to fix it (eg. recent increase in train derailments).
The domestic economy is pretty much a Ponzi scheme where regular people have to go deep into debt to be able to live.
Production is mostly dead in America and as they say "The American dream is now made in China". That is why there is a gigantic trade deficit with China.
The National debt is $35 trillion and the regime keeps printing a trillion dollars every 100 days which will only affect the regular people.
...

Same could have been said about Syrian Army. By the way ISIS didn't have an army nor did they march on anywhere. It started as guerilla warfare with terrorist cells destabilizing the country weakening security and military forces accompanied by a color revolution and then it ended up with an army and conquers.

Another thing you have to keep in mind is that ideology-wise ISIS is pretty much Wahhabists which aren't categorized as Muslims by any of the Muslims. The birthplace of this radical ideology is Arabia, their leader still resides in Arabia and most number of followers of this radical ideology are in Arabia.
In comparison Syria and Iraq are filled with Shia and Sunni Muslims.

He is not a reliable source but the information coming out of his mouth is when it is something we already knew and had a lot of other evidence from other sources.
It's pretty much Al-Qaeda and 9/11 all over again. US regime hiring terrorists to do its bidding. And the evidence about such a thing comes out from United States itself years later such as these recent court filings that points to how CIA recruited the terrorists for the 9/11 attacks on Americans:
https://thegrayzone.com/2023/04/18/9-11-hijackers-cia-recruits/